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Recent media accounts of child sexual abuse in
Brooklyn’s Orthodox community have highlighted the threat victims face from
teachers, rabbis and yeshiva staff as perpetrators, and the special pressures —
even intimidation — they face from community leaders not to report such cases
to secular law enforcement.

But a list of child sexual abuse cases in that
community suggests that another source of pressure, even closer to home, may be
at least as important.

The list, released by Brooklyn District
Attorney Charles Hynes earlier this year, describes 97 abuse cases that Hynes
says he prosecuted over the last three years. According to the data, 20% of
these cases involved family members — usually fathers, brothers or uncles — and
another 37% involved a perpetrator who was a friend or acquaintance.

By contrast, only about 12% of the cases
appeared to involve rabbis, bar mitzvah tutors, counselors or yeshiva
employees, including janitors and security guards. The next largest group of
perpetrators consisted of strangers, who accounted for about 17% of Hynes’s
Orthodox-related prosecutions.

The information from Hynes’s list must be
treated with caution for a number of reasons. Some cases — Hynes’s office won’t
say which — include adult victims while others involved non-Jewish perpetrators
or victims. But according to Rhonnie Jaus, the head of Hynes’s sex crimes
division, the “vast majority” of cases described are those of Orthodox
children.

Hynes has also refused to release the names of
the perpetrators, making an assessment of the professional positions of those
described as family members impossible. Also, rabbis and other authority
figures may make up a larger proportion of offenders than the list indicates,
but not be present on it simply because people are too scared to report them.

Nevertheless, according to specialists in the
field of child abuse, the data are consistent with what is known about such
abuse more broadly. Cases involving ultra-Orthodox authority figures dominate
headlines, as do those involving clergy members, football coaches and
schoolteachers, because they often tend to have large numbers of victims. In
terms of victims per perpetrator, such figures constitute concentrated sources
of threat to children. But Hynes’s chart indicates that the general threat from
family members cannot be ignored.

“You tend to expect that the majority of offenders
are not people in a high-profile position,” said David Finkelhor, director of
the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
“They are brothers and uncles, fathers and neighbors.”

Just as secular victims often struggle to bring
charges against people close to them, ultra-Orthodox families also grapple with
the implications of accusing friends and relatives, these experts say.

“The family doesn’t want the breadwinner to be
jailed and the income cut off,” Finkelhor said of secular victims’ families.
“They don’t want the rest of the family turning against them because the kid’s
fingered the grandparent.”

While the incidence of child sexual abuse
within the circle of family and close acquaintances may be no greater than in
secular society, ultra-Orthodox families do face special issues when wrestling
with the challenge of reporting such people to the police.

Judy Braun, an author who was raised in the
ultra-Orthodox community, said the distinction between family and non-family
cases may be only partially useful when examining the ultra-Orthodox community.
Braun, whose recent novel, “Hush,” is based on her experience of witnessing a
friend being abused by a family member, said that because the community is like
an extended family, there is often little perceived difference between family
members and non-family members. “The [perpetrator] is a third cousin, or a
friend of the family, or a son-in-law of a [family member],” Braun said. “It’s
like a spider web.”

Further, even without direct and explicit
interference from rabbinic authorities or the pressure of ruining a relative’s
life, Braun said, parents are under intense pressure not to risk their children
being tarnished as impure. “The attitude is a bit like Muslims,” Braun said.
“It’s a stain on the [victims] themselves.”

Mesirah — a religious prohibition against informing on a fellow Jew to the
secular authorities — is often blamed for dissuading victims from reporting
abusers to the police. But there is anecdotal evidence that even in cases where
the perpetrator is a non-Jew, ultra-Orthodox families struggle to go to police.

According to Jaus, in one recent case two
ultra-Orthodox girls were separately abducted and sexually assaulted. A DNA
sample linked a non-Jewish man to the crimes. But both families refused to
cooperate, in part, said Jaus, because they feared that an investigation could
tarnish the girls’ marriage chances as well as their siblings’ ability to get
into school and get married. (Law enforcement sources confirmed that an
indictment has finally been filed after one of the families agreed to
cooperate.)

Such cases stand or fall on fears of stigma and
shame, rather than intimidation. Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva
University, said victims who cooperate with police risk their future on the
hope that they will not be identified. “I’ve heard a number of victims who told
me that their lives are literally destroyed, ruined,” Hamilton said. “They will
never marry if anyone finds out they were assaulted.”

Even in cases not involving rabbis or other
respected community figures, leaders within Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community
still often pressure families, according to Jaus. “It’s not just well respected
rabbis or someone from school” acting as a perpetrator that sparks community
pressure, she said.

Teresa Huizar, executive director of the
National Children’s Alliance, said such concerns are typical of conservative
religious communities. “The shame created around abuse ought to be exclusively
carried on the shoulders of the abuser,” Huizar said. Instead, shame is
displaced onto victims and their families, representing “a shifting of moral
responsibility and weight from the offender to the victim.”